Symbol Seekers in the Desert

March 1982

"Freedom," she said softly, "I paint wild flowers because to me they represent joy and freedom." The cadences of her native Hungary still sound in the speech of Phoenix artist Andrea de Kerpely-Zak as she speaks of these symbols from the language of earth.

For centuries artists in every country have used flowers for artistic expression, studying them in woodlands, prairies, gardens, in still life arrangements, beside lily ponds, on mountainsides.

But only recently in the desert. Result? The desert, ruthless to those who abuse her, has rewarded artists with new forms, new energy, and some with new lives.

Artists with names like Stanley and Pratt and Moran began to discover the deserts of Arizona about 1846. Their purpose at first was to illustrate surveys. Without pictures how would you have described those weird shapes along the Gila River to a congressman back East.

Arizona artists soon became a trickle. Before the trickle became a river of renown, purposes had changed and changed again. But through most of those years ran that echo of joy and freedom, expressed often through flowers, that Andrea de Kerpely-Zak speaks of today.

Georgia O'Keeffe, who will be 95 this year, began to demonstrate it to the world in the early 1930s. After two summers in the desert near Taos, New Mexico - summers that included trips to Canyon de Chelly and the Grand Canyon in Arizona - O'Keeffe wrote, "I was quite excited over our country."

When she found her male colleagues back East full of esoteric words and still looking to Europe for artistic ideas, she set up her easel beside desert bones and desert flowers and began a series of Great American Paintings.

Her flowers appeared in unlikely places, as they do in the actual desert. O'Keeffe clustered them in a space of sky between a cow's skull and mountaintops or on a gray thunder-filled cloud. Or she painted tiny desert blooms in giant size, to make us look.

Today we hear the theme of joy and freedom Kerpely-Zak sounds from other Arizona artists, too. Contemporary names, in a sampling as diverse as Ross Stefan, Joby, Jerry Becker, and Genevieve Reckling.

Ross Stefan, like Georgia O'Keeffe, is a native of Wisconsin, but he came to live and paint in the desert as a youngster. Coincidentally, Stefan also traveled to Taos. In his mid-20s he went to meet the great Leon Gaspard who had admired Stefan's work in a Santa Fe gallery. "His words were a great source of encouragement to me. Still are," said Stefan, whose own impressionistic paintings of the Southwest became internationally known during his first (1972) exhibition in New York's Grand Central Art Galleries.

To attend an exhibit of Ross Stefan's oil paintings is like enjoying a sunny morning's ride along a rock-strewn riverbed. Or it's like being in the midst of the crowd at a color-flooded Indian dance. He paints the land, the horsemen, the Indians of today's West with the perception of a poet, and his strong sure use of color reflects his fascination with what he calls the "high-keyness of the light here."

Now in his mid-40s, the tall, broad-shouldered, deeply-tanned Stefan still spends weeks exploring the desert he knows and loves. He does not sentimentalize it, however. "It's a gutsy place," he said. "The struggle for survival is out here on the desert. It's not a candy-box-cover kind of land. That's why I like it."

This simple field note of a painting, a spring-bright clump of wild flowers anchored on an arid canyon floor, seemed to symbolize what Stefan was saying.

The brightest splotches of color on winter patios in the desert are often geraniums. One day Tucson artist Joby, a native-born Arizonan who often paints desert plants on location, could resist her geraniums no longer.

"I had four big pots of them on the patio," she said. "I'd been looking at them for weeks, the colors particularly because they are so brilliant, so ..." A willowy blond, Joby's gentle voice and thoughtful manner also throw a shadow of early Diane Keaton. "A picture began to form in my head of how I might make the feel and touch of them come across in a different way, in a way I hadn't seen before."

Joby picked up thoughts, dropped them, let hands finish others, as she remembered how it was. She brought the four big flowerpots full of geraniums into her studio, "so that my room was filled with their aroma. They were fresh blooming and with the light shining on them ..." pause. "You could see those gorgeous red tones on the blossoms and there's a velvety kind of feeling to the leaves that...."

As Joby talked geraniums, she too touched upon the freedom theme. She said she didn't even stop to sketch her composition first. "I did it because I wanted to. There was a feeling of freedom, and I just let it happen."

Tucson artist Jerry Becker painted in watercolor the same flower species that had caught Stefan's eye and Kerpely-Zak's, too. Often mistaken for daisies, they are from the Sunflower family. These bright yellow blooms are so tenacious they hold to the stem until they become dry and papery. The common name is, yep, paper flower.

For Becker the flowers offered an invitation to do another of his unique, semiabstract watercolors, one of those he does on rice paper. These newforms are Becker's gift from the desert.

Some time back he discovered a way to mount fiber-filled rice paper on acrylic board and cover it with a coat of glue "that is kind of a resist to watercolor." The result is an unusual texture. "Sometimes I will use 10 or 12 glazes on the surface to bring up the texture."

He utilizes this texture in his complex backgrounds, which he calls his "negative areas." And that for him is "where the fun is. Anyone can copy just what's there," he said, while his listener thinks. Anyone? Every leaf in his composition is important, each structured to keep the viewer's eye within Becker's format. Did you find the suggestion of a saguaro base in the upper right hand comer? He used it "to establish this painting as a desert piece."

Genevieve Reckling, who looks at her world near Phoenix with large, wise eyes, regularly turns them to flowers for her creative impulse. "I've lived in the desert for 15 years now," she said, "and I love it. It's a wonderful place for an artist to work, because there's so much energy and color. And color is what I'm dealing with, color and light."

Two years ago she did a series of poppies in bloom at Picacho Peak. More recently she's found a piece of land "out near Pinnacle Peak. I have a very personal response to that land. It's almost as though there's a concentration of energy right there," she said. Most of the cacti she's done have come from that particular area.

"The forms are so bizarre," Reckling said. "And when our strong sunlight hits the cactus, it's as though the cactus cradles it, holds it, and makes another form. And the colors of the blooms are so intense! Especially for me because I deal in colors, strong colors. My idea in doing cactus is to dwell on the colors as well as the lights and the darks, the sun, and the shadow."

Reckling's huge oil demonstrates her response to the energy of the desert. The bristling hedgehog cactus appears to rise, as though out of its own secret life, to present its blossoms to viewers.

We were looking at several of her strong, yet delicate, watercolors. The flowers are loose, unbound. She said what she strives for in composition is a "flow" to the flowers. "See," a small hand defined the fluent line of the painting before us, "there's a definite direction, yet it's very gentle, and you feel music to them."

"People ask me why I paint flowers" she continued. "Flowers, particularly wild flowers, are probably one of my basic expressions of freedom and joy." This was clarified for her in 1976. "I went back for a visit to my native Hungary. I had very sentimental feelings when it came time once more to leave that country. Sorrow at leaving but joy at being able to return to America."

She, her husband, and their young family were driving out had to pass through three gate blocks, each soldier-guarded. The wait at the gates was long, tension-filled. As they waited, they walked and ran with the children in roadside fields. It was there that Kerpely-Zak found the wild flowers.

"I collected them," she said. "They were something still free to take with, something they couldn't take away. I traveled with them back to Arizona."

Today Andrea goes out into the desert "to paint wild flowers in nature. I just sit within the flowers. These," she said, pointing to the yellow paper flowers, "I like very much because they come up so gracefully and are so deli-cate in the way they look on the desert. See how they flow?"

"I should say very quickly that the joy of my painting is the stems, the way they live within each other. They harmonize each other within themselves."

They look beautiful.